Dave Hickey objects

For more than 40 years, Dave Hickey has looked at and written about art and culture as if his life depended on it.

No, not just his life, but all our lives. He's lectured, been a freelance curator and earned an honoured place in American letters, becoming a MacArthur Fellow in 2001. ("These days, I'm handled like a loaded weapon of a slightly larger calibre.")

But this softly spoken, broad-backed man in a tailored jacket and Cuban heels is angry and, on Sunday morning, he says so: "As happy as I am to engage in this lovely, civil occasion, that doesn't mean that I'm not angry." His irony accentuates his Texan accent.

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Hickey, a "stepchild" of Andy Warhol's Factory, wants a return to a "secret art world". ("I like things little and private.") His reason is not nostalgic: it's acutely political.

Referring to a coterie of international curators who have, over the past 20 years, promoted installation and video art to the detriment of object-based work, Hickey says, "We have reached a point at which the very definition of public art means the public has nothing to do with it. The entire endeavour is run by institutional bureaucrats and curators of marginal educations and many frequent-flyer points."

Frequent flyer points had concluded his account of being asked to consider international artists in a show he was curating in Santa Fe and his refusing to accept offers of "We fly you" to familiarise himself with their work. The globe-trotting curators of his story had no such scruples.

But Hickey's argument for making art objects - painting and sculpture - rather than time-based work - installation and video art - concerns the viewer's perceptual experience, rather than his own preference of any imagined conflict of interest.

So he anticipates the objection that the experience of looking at a painting is often just as fleeting with another anecdote:

"In '59, I see a wonderful show of Ellsworth Kelly's (New York abstract painter) and, in the intervening 40 years I have, maybe, seen all of these paintings once or twice again in large exhibitions."

You might be forgiven for thinking that those limited opportunities to see the Kellys equate with the limited opportunity one has for viewing a temporary installation or video screening.

But, "The reason it is not the same is that I could remember the Ellsworth Kellys: the Ellsworth Kellys were organised. (Homer's) Iliad is not in meters to make some sort of statement: it is in meters so that we can remember it. Paintings are not organised as an end: they are organised as an occasion. As a consequence, objects can live in memory."

At the heart of Hickey's mock despair at the institutionalised art world is his rejection of the notion that "art is good for you".

Nothing could be more inimical to Hickey (except perhaps the neo-medievalism in the books of J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling: "these artists create a world from which adult thought and desire have been banished".)

He flings in the face of public virtue what he calls the liberation of "crazy laughter": "In the US and the UK, how do you know when someone is morally defective? Crazy laughter. You know what I mean? Bimbos in '50s movies - how can you tell they're bimbos? Well, first they smoke, but then they laugh - 'Ha ha ha'. How can you tell the megalomaniac who is going to take over the world? Crazy laughter - 'Ha ha haaa'.

"We live in a culture in which solemnity, earnestness and sincerity are equated with seriousness. Unless you wrench art away from public virtue, we have absolutely no way to make it live.

"Art does not make us better people. I know for sure that art does not make artists happy. It is not a beneficent activity. I don't think that anybody should make art that is not necessary."

Is Hickey really angry? "I live at the beach; I go to Las Vegas every week. If the art world disappears, the card table at the Bellagio will still be there."